1. Field
The current disclosure relates to traffic management and queuing solutions which include hierarchical packet schedulers.
2. Background
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Traffic management and queuing solutions include packet (or cell) schedulers which have hierarchies; these hierarchies organize queues and traffic aggregations in the form of trees according to the network structure, and scheduling is performed on a contiguous range of queues or scheduling nodes and at each hierarchical level of the trees. The need for scheduling using queues may arise for example in a network in which allocation of resources to many competing independent entities must be performed. In such a case, the entities are arranged in queues awaiting allocation of the resources. Another scenario in which scheduling using queues is used is in managing the egress of messages in a network to ensure that a traffic volume remains within limitations imposed by service agreements even when new users are added, removed or migrated. In both cases, the queues may be arranged in queue ranges and the ranges may be associated with one or more scheduling nodes. A scheduling hierarchy of a scheduling node is thus an order with which specified queue ranges are serviced.